


Making Time

by ncamferd



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Between Episodes, Bullying, Canon compliant (more or less), Catra and Adora both get better I swear, During Canon, F/F, Gaslighting, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Canon (maybe), The Happy Ending is the Show Ending, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, between scenes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24509587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncamferd/pseuds/ncamferd
Summary: Adora and Catra are back together, and for the first time in three years appear to be on the same side. But can things really be that simple? How can a relationship defined for so long by pain and betrayal be rebuilt, and should it be? As the war against Horde Prime rages on, they both have to figure out what they mean to each other, and what that means for themselves.
Relationships: Adora & Catra & Shadow Weaver | Light Spinner (She-Ra), Adora & Catra (She-Ra), Adora & Shadow Weaver | Light Spinner (She-Ra), Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Catra & Shadow Weaver | Light Spinner (She-Ra)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 48





	Making Time

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is my first attempt at fanfiction in over five years, and I was inspired to write by the arc Adora and Catra follow in the final season of SPOP. The ending was wonderful, and I was very impressed with how much satisfying character development the writers were able to squeeze into the last thirteen episodes of the show. That said, there were moments that I felt had a lot more going on behind the scenes.
> 
> My plan here is to expand on Catra and Adora's story with scenes that I imagine may have happened in between the events we got to see in the show. There's a ton of ideas and character beats that are implied by the show, but for reasons of time are not explored in detail. So here, I'd like to take a much more in-depth look at how Catra and Adora evolve individually and together over the course of Season 5. I may also expand this past the finale, but we'll worry about that when I get there.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and enjoy my hopefully-not-too-terrible first try.

One day, if nothing else, Catra would get a full night’s rest.

At least, that’s what she promised herself as she gradually emerged from yet another bout of fitful sleep. This time, the nightmare had been hazy, a collection of disconnected images that became harder and harder to remember as her mind became more alert.

A green pool of glowing liquid.

A sea of unrecognizable faces and a cacophony of voices.

A Princess disappearing in a flash of light.

Catra supposed she should be grateful. By her standards, at least her body had deigned to wake itself up before things really started to spiral. At least she hadn’t felt herself jerk awake. And given that no one had come running, she guessed she had escaped the experience quietly as well. Still, the dregs of the nightmare remained, and Catra breathed steadily while she waited for her fur to lose its bristle and for her heart to slow down.

As she did so, she took the opportunity to take in her surroundings. Up until now, she had seen very little of her new “home”. Presumably, she was on whatever ship Adora and Glimmer had used to rescue her. She remembered waking up on the bridge in Adora’s arms, flanked by Sparkles and Arrow Boy. She also remembered, much to her horror, glimpsing Entrapta, and what looked like another Prime clone. She’d had so many questions, so many things she’d wanted to say, but whatever She-Ra’s magic had done to her, she’d quickly faded back into delirium. She figured someone, probably Adora, must have then carried her off and left her in privacy, because now Catra found herself lying on her back, staring at the ceiling of a small bedroom.

The place had a distinct un-Etherian quality to it. Very different from the sweeping curves and austere grandeur of Horde Prime’s ship, but unmistakably alien. It took Catra a second to realize where she had seen the sharp angles and strange lights before, but it suddenly came back to her in a wave. This was a First Ones ship. _The_ First Ones ship. The one she had failed to retrieve for the Horde. The one that had served so briefly as her kingdom in the Crimson Waste. The one she had captured Adora in. The one where she had first learned about the portal…

Maybe that’s why she still felt so ill at ease.

Catra rolled over in frustration, lying on her stomach and putting her face in her arms. She started cycling through her options. She couldn’t go back to sleep and she couldn’t go out and face the others. This place was too small to hide herself away like she had always done as a kid. No matter where she went, Entrapta at the very least was sure to find her in the process of tearing through the ship. She’d known the princess well enough to treat that as a given.

Catra shivered at the thought of that meeting. No, leaving her room was absolutely out of the question.

It seemed like the only thing left for her to do was to lie and reminisce, to think about how she had gotten here. That of course was another prospect that Catra found troubling. She had caught herself reminiscing plenty of times over the last three years, and it had never brought her anything other than pain. Better to always be looking forward, striving ahead and leaving all that ache behind. But now… she had to. She had to explain it to herself. She had to contain it, lest the fissures already eating at her mind continue to spread and widen without end. She had to try and put it into words, if not for her own sake, then for Adora’s. Catra wasn’t going to hurt her again, and if that meant dredging up lots of painful memories, so be it.

And in any case, stuck in this bedroom, scared to fall asleep, what other options did she have? Catra was tired of planning, tired of analyzing her surroundings, of looking for strengths and weaknesses, tired of figuring out how to game the machine.

But right now, more than anything else, Catra was tired of waking up in places that she didn’t belong in.

“Dammit… I guess that’s as good a place to start as any”, she thought.

Looking back at where she had spent her life, she supposed that there were lots of reasons for why she’d so rarely felt welcome. As a kid, the Fright Zone had seemed to go out of its way to beat you down. The clanging and grinding of industrial machinery combined into a dull roar that followed you wherever you went, reverberating off walls and down hallways and eventually across the inside of your skull. Acrid smells were unavoidable and a metallic tang always permeated the air. Rarely was the haze outright choking, but the thought of what you might be doing to yourself just by breathing was never that far out of mind. And the place was just so unrelentingly _ugly_. Catra had now seen the harsh standards it was failing to emulate, but even as a child she had known that the Fright Zone’s architecture was just so obviously and indescribably _wrong_. No matter where she went, she felt like it was rejecting her. And to a lesser extent, she felt like it was rejecting everyone else as well.

Of course, she hadn’t needed the _buildings_ in the Fright Zone to give her that feeling. The people in the Fright Zone were perfectly willing to tell her directly. Being a cadet in the Horde meant constantly being on alert, against both your superiors and your peers. Force captains would punish you if you were late to meetings, if you failed a training exercise, if you didn’t pass a physical. They’d punish you if an injury didn’t heal fast enough. They’d punish you if you spoke when you were meant to be silent, or if you remained silent when you were supposed to speak. And punishment was of course nothing if not a team sport. Squads had to be disciplined, and what better way to enforce discipline than to drive squad-mates to enforce it on each other?

Well, Catra could think of a few.

In her experience, team building in the Horde amounted to little more than a giant circular firing squad, a desperate scramble away from the bottom of the social pile. If you had to throw one of your comrades down just to stand a little taller, that was simply part of the deal. Even if everyone felt like dirt most of the time, it was nice to know that someone had it worse than you, at least for a little bit. So with every official punishment like shortened rest periods, reduced rations, cleaning or maintenance duties, there came a slew of unofficial ones. Bullying was of course the most visible, and Catra had been tripped down enough stairs and locked in enough lockers to know how much that could hurt. But really, the most effective punishment had always been ostracism, the countless subtle ways that Catra or anyone else at the bottom were told that they weren’t welcome. She thought back to all the conversations that had died as she drew near, all the plans that had been made without her involvement, all the ways she had felt edged out and slighted in any group. The Horde may have done its damnedest to make Catra feel worthless, but she knew she served at least one use: as a warning to everyone else.

Be careful. One foot out of line and this could be you.

In retrospect, it’s no wonder that this made for such a less-than-stellar war effort. It seemed like most people were just as ready to attack each other as they were the enemy. And they ran into each other much more often than any princess. In this, the Horde was just as twisted and inhospitable as the towers and refineries it had built for itself. Again, no place that anyone could rightly call a home.

Which had, in reality, always been the point. The Fright Zone was made to churn out soldiers, to make them ache for battle with the outside world, if only because that meant they were able to leave. Force Captains had drilled “War is not soft, so the soft will not win wars” into their heads for years, since they had been old enough to understand the words really. And what would they find outside the Fright Zone? People who enjoyed all the comforts and security that they had been denied their entire lives? If that bred resentment and bitterness, all the better. Catra certainly understood that those feelings could be great motivators…

So the place Catra had spent the first two decades of her life was one giant war machine. Almost literally. The noises and the smells and the betrayal and the violence. All of it, intentionally or not, prepared the cadets to experience the same things in battle. The Fright Zone wasn’t meant to feel like a home to Catra, any more than a gun was supposed to feel like a home to a bullet. And whatever else you might say, the Horde was certainly good at producing bullets.

Thinking back on it, these were all observations that came effortlessly to Catra now, because they were things she had realized about her first “home” years ago. She had known what the Horde was since she was a kitten, since she had first come to understand her place in the hierarchy. And she didn’t have any cadet or force captain to thank for that…

_“Such impertinence, and after all the effort I’ve put towards your success? Unsurprising of course. I’ve always known that any attempt to mold one such as you would be wasted. But fear not child. You may lack the temperament of a student, but the body has its own ways of being taught. And soon enough, the mind will follow…”_

The voice drifted unbidden into Catra’s mind, along with the image of the closest thing she had ever had to a mother. Still staring at her pillow, Catra snapped her eyes shut, desperately trying to will the memory away. But for a second, the green smoke and arcing electricity that she glimpsed when she closed her eyes turned red. And while the colors changed, other details remained the same: the painful locking of muscles, the fur standing on end, the overwhelming helplessness. Only this time, the experience was shot through with a feeling of intimacy that made the casual cruelty unimaginably worse.

Catra opened her eyes in a glare and waited for her heartbeat to slow again. She breathed out carefully.

“I may have learned a few things from Horde Prime, but Shadow Weaver was the best teacher I’ve ever had”, she thought to herself bitterly.

In all her years at the bottom of the Horde, Catra hadn’t been given many opportunities to feel good about herself. That was the whole point of being at the bottom. But one thing she was always able to return to, was the fact that _she understood_. It was that understanding that made waking up every day in the Fright Zone feel so fundamentally wrong. But it was also a point of pride that she could cling to, an absolute proof of her potential and intelligence, even if no one else could see it.

Because Catra saw through the propaganda and the rhetoric and the lies. She saw how self-destructive training was, how violence was laced into every facet of existence in the Fright Zone, and how manipulative and self-serving the people at the top were. She knew that whatever Hordak claimed about rescuing Etheria, all he would do is export all the pain and suffering he had bred. She saw how ugly the buildings were. And she was absolutely certain that however much everyone else looked down on her, she alone could see the truth.

After everything Shadow Weaver had done to her, she had at least given Catra that. She had saved her from a comforting lie.

While Catra lingered on that unpleasant thought, a dull bang suddenly echoed from the other side of the wall. Her ears flicked out and she looked up from the pillow into the dim light of the room, her body tensing as she prepared to leap up from the bed. She waited for the noises to get closer, straining to identify the source.

After long seconds, it seemed like whatever commotion had caused the bang was over. Catra relaxed slightly, resting her chin on the pillow, though her eyes and ears continued to scan the room. Finally, she gave up and figured that it must have been Entrapta experimenting with another part of the ship. The image of the tech princess rooting through wires and control panels with her hair appeared so clearly in Catra’s mind.

Suddenly, she felt herself tensing all over again. She knew that a completely different wave of painful memories was about to crash over her, and she felt herself on the verge of panic.

“No, don’t think about that. _Do not think about that_. Not yet… Gods, can’t you control yourself for just one second without everything spiraling?”

Catra rolled onto her back and pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes, growling in frustration. If one sound could do that, how the hell had she survived so long in the Horde after the portal? After Scorpia had left? After… Thaymor? Every square inch of the Fright Zone was a monument to a part of her past that was now ruined. The mess hall, the battle simulations, the locker room, the Black Garnet Chamber… the bunk bed... How had she kept it together for so long?

Well the truth, she now knew, was that she hadn’t.

When Catra had started climbing through the ranks of the Horde, she had thought that the Fright Zone would finally start feeling like a home. Or at least, that she wouldn’t find it so actively repulsive. And things had been better, for a while. The room upgrade had certainly been nice, as had the fear and deference that had replaced the disinterest and disdain in the eyes of her fellow soldiers. Her _underlings_ , to be more precise. At the very least, waking up as a force captain and then as a co-leader of the entire Horde lacked the old fear and trepidation. She _wanted_ to get out of bed, she _wanted_ to scheme and plot and fight and win. Because she was good at it, and she knew it. And by then, everyone else knew it too.

But even with all of that, the Fright Zone had still never quite felt like a home. She understood that now. And even while she climbed higher than the old Catra could ever have imagined, she saw out of the corner of her eye that the ugliness remained. In more ways than one.

Catra’s mind felt sluggish as it cycled through flashes of her rise to power. She couldn’t remember ever forcing this level of self-reflection on herself. Clearly, her brain was having none of it.

“Damn it”, she thought. There was no getting around this.

There was of course one person at the center of all these memories, someone who both complicated and simplified every narrative Catra tried to tell about herself. They had played together, eaten together, trained together, and explored together for as long as either could remember. And with her, all the ugliness and despair which pervaded the Fright Zone seemed to retreat, if only for a little while. With her, Catra was as close as she ever could be to feeling safe.

Yes, waking up in the barracks with Adora felt more like home than the Fright Zone itself could ever be. Catra knew how bad the Horde really was, and the fact that in some small way they could shield each other from it meant more to her than she could ever describe.

...which made Adora’s decision to leave all the more devastating. Because at that moment, Catra realized that it had been an illusion. She had never been safe. She had never been cared for or thought about. Not really. Not in the way she cared for or thought about Adora. And even now, after three years of growing regret, after Adora had once again pulled her back from the brink, she still knew that that was true. Adora may always care about her, may always go out of her way to save her, but that was just who she was. She went out of her way to save everybody and everything.

Catra had just always been in particular need of saving.

And at Thaymor, when Adora found people who needed saving from _Catra_ , rather than the other way around, there hadn’t even been a question. All Catra had gotten was a quick offer to defect with her, like she was an afterthought. Like Adora hadn’t just thrown their lives away for people she had just met. No, it had been worse than finding out that Adora didn’t care about her. She’d found out that Adora cared about everyone else just as much.

Catra was worse than nothing. She was a statistic. Whatever Adora said, that would be the truth of it.

…and yet…

As if on cue, Catra suddenly became aware of footsteps approaching the outside of her door. Her heart, which had only just settled back into its normal rhythm, began pounding again, and for the third time she felt herself slip into fight or flight.

In a way, flight won out, and Catra rolled onto her side, facing away from the entrance. She didn’t know yet how she was going to first approach the others, but it wasn’t going to be like this: lying in bed, terrorized by dreams.

A soft knock came from the door, followed by a low woosh as it retracted up into the ceiling. Despite her best efforts to appear asleep, Catra couldn’t stop her ear from giving an involuntary twitch as an excruciatingly familiar whisper crossed the room.

“Catra?” Adora breathed out as she cautiously entered, the door falling shut behind her. “Is everything ok?”

After a pause and no response, she continued, “The others keep telling me that I shouldn’t be bothering you, that you need to rest. I know they’re right but I, uh, I thought I heard something… aaaand I wanted to come and check again to make sure you…”

She trailed off, and just stood silently by the doorway for another minute. Then she let out a sigh.

“Of course, you’re fine. Why wouldn’t you be? Everything’s fine… I mean, it’s not. There’s a lot of things that are messed up. Most things actually… But right now you’re fine. Um, right now you're asleep, is what I mean. And that’s good, you should be! Which I’m now messing up by talking to you. I’m probably gonna wake you up… This is stupid. I’m being stupid.”

Adora had said all this so quickly and so quietly that for anyone else it would have come across as gibberish. But Catra wasn’t anyone else, and Catra understood.

Gods, if the sound of Adora’s furtive whispers had tugged at her heart, the sound of Adora’s stellar situational awareness made her want to rush over and hug her. But as much as part of her wanted to laugh, another part of her felt the return of creeping fear. This was not good. Catra knew that she was digging into some incredibly toxic memories. Memories of her own suffering and loss. Memories of all the pain she had caused for others and all of the lives she had helped ruin. And now in walks the person around which all those memories seemed to swirl. The person who had hurt her the most, and who Catra had tried the hardest to hurt in return.

She was scared. Perhaps more than when she had woken up from the nightmare, she was scared. And even more so than before, Catra was sure of one thing: she had no idea what she could say.

Adora herself seemed to have reached the same conclusion, because she made no more attempt, unintentionally or otherwise, to wake Catra. Instead, she quietly tiptoed over to the foot of the bed. For her part, Catra had kept her eyes tightly shut, but now she opened one ever so slightly, catching the vague outline of Adora hovering down by her feet. Soon, after standing there silently for a while, she carefully sat down on the edge of the bed frame, shifting the mattress as little as possible.

For what seemed like an eternity, neither Catra nor Adora moved or made a sound.

Catra didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to think. She wanted Adora to stand up and leave. She wanted Adora to lie down next to her and fall asleep.

The one thing she did know, was that she didn’t want to keep remembering. Not when the chief motivator of the entire exercise was sitting less than two inches away from her foot. She’d work on the self-reflection later, when she’d gotten away from Adora. When she’d gotten away from this ship. When she’d gotten away from everything.

But as much as she wanted to stop thinking, Catra’s mind once again had other plans. Unbidden, another memory came to the forefront. It was old, but familiar, and as sharp and damning as it had been a few days ago.

_“Come out. I know you didn’t mean to hit Lonnie.”_

_“We were all just having fun. You didn’t have to do it… Why’d ya do it?”_

_“I_ am _your friend Catra. I’m always gonna be your friend.”_

That final promise now weighed on Catra more than anything. More than her experience with Horde Prime. More than the portal.

It weighed on Catra because it was true.

…at least, in a way it was true. Adora had come back. Despite everything Catra had done, Adora had come back. And now here she was, sitting at the end of her bed, clearly worried that she was alright.

Of all the promises Adora had broken, this had to be the one she kept…

Back on Prime’s ship, when the memory had first come back to her, Catra had felt like she was drowning. Glimmer had been right. There was no escape, no way back. And seeing what had once been Hordak, the shadow of everything she had once tried to prove herself to, she realized that it had all been for nothing. It had always been for nothing.

When she had first started reminiscing with Glimmer, the memories of Adora had brought happiness. Pain and regret as well, but happiness all the same. It was an intangible warmth that she hadn’t felt in a very long time, warmth that she had stopped herself from feeling every time she had thought about Adora in the last three years. It was raw and it was exposing, but it was wonderful. But happiness also wasn’t the end of it. It _couldn’t_ be the end of it. And it was in that corridor, unsure which way to go, that her memories finally gave Catra what she really needed: clarity.

For the hundredth time, the image of three fresh cut marks flashed in Catra’s mind, slashed below tear-filled blue eyes.

“All I do is hurt people…” she thought.

That simple, undeniable truth had settled into Catra’s stomach like a lead weight.

She’d known that she had hurt people during her rise to power in the Horde. Oftentimes, she’d _wanted_ to hurt people, to make them feel some small part of what she felt herself. And for a while it was easy to justify. Was she supposed to feel bad about taking down Shadow Weaver or Hordak? Was she supposed to feel bad about putting Lonnie and the others through hell after what they had subjected her to for years? Was she supposed to feel bad about giving Adora a few scratches after she had ripped her heart out? None of them had ever given her the recognition and the security that she had deserved, that she had needed. And once Catra had realized that she was powerful enough to just take it from them, was she supposed to feel bad that they were all too weak to stop her?

No, that had all been something they had coming. Catra had been given nothing, and what little she had had been taken from her, so it was only fair that she return the favor.

Catra had told herself that for a long time, and she’d believed it. She _had_ to believe it. As her actions got more monstrous, it was the only thing she could cling to in order to stay sane. This was something that the world deserved. This was something she had been driven to.

But with that memory, and so many others she shared with Adora… It was so painfully, blindingly clear that that just wasn’t the case. The world hadn’t changed her. Catra had _known_ that the Horde was evil, but she took to its hierarchy like she was made for it. No one had forced her to hurt people. She’d been capable of it all along. And when the Horde had given her the means and opportunity, she’d taken it.

As ugly as the buildings had always seemed to her, there was something inside Catra that had been perfectly comfortable living in them.

And as close as she and Adora had been, so much of their history was laced with Catra’s resentment. She resented the favoritism the world had shown Adora, from the force captains, from the other cadets, and especially from Shadow Weaver. She resented that the Horde had forced her again and again into a place of vulnerability in front of Adora. She resented that every time she had been hurt and humiliated and denied success, Adora had been there to witness it all. She resented all the times Adora had tried to save her from the same people she treated as friends, mentors, and parents. She resented all the times Adora had failed.

But more than anything, she resented Adora’s overwhelming blindness. Catra couldn’t fathom how Adora could watch her best friend get hurt again and again and never piece together that something was very wrong with the Horde. She couldn’t fathom how someone able to navigate all the haphazard training, crushing punishments, and pointless rules to become a force captain, couldn’t see how corrosive Hordak’s plans were. She couldn’t fathom how someone could live in the Fright Zone and not be disgusted with it every day.

So at the same time that Catra prided herself on being the only one who knew the truth about the Horde, she quietly resented Adora for being ignorant of its obviousness. In retrospect, it was what had allowed a small part of her to always doubt that Adora truly cared.

And so despite how close the two became over the years, and despite how much Catra needed to be with Adora, she lashed out at her best friend in large and small ways. She sniped at her accomplishments with sarcasm and guilt trips. She pushed her into doing things that got her in trouble. She called her dumb with a level of sincerity that varied by the day. And of course there were the times, rare though they were, that the claws came out literally. Small acts of revenge for things Adora hadn’t even known she’d done. And in turn, the fact that she hadn't known made Catra lash out all the more.

Most frustrating was the fact that Catra couldn’t remember if swiping back at Adora had made her feel better or worse. Hell, she couldn’t even remember if she had done it consciously. How much did she actually feel at the time, and how much was she projecting back? Clearly Catra hadn’t known herself as well as she’d thought, so why should she start now?

What she did know though, was that her fights with Adora after the latter had joined the rebellion hadn’t come out of nowhere. They had been building for a long time.

And having realized that, memory and dream came together with that same terrible clarity…

 _“Why’d ya do it?”_ said Adora, leaning down next to her beneath the stairs.

 _“Why did you do it?!”_ shouted Adora, standing before a portal as it devoured their entire world.

Kind eyes…

Furious eyes…

Adora had changed in many ways over the years, but the answer to her question ultimately remained the same.

“This is who I am,” Catra thought as she stole another glimpse at real life Adora, still sitting silently at the end of her bed. “I’ve always hurt Adora. I’ve always wanted to hurt everyone. I just didn’t have the power. This is who I’ve always been, and who I always will be.”

It had taken Catra so long to come to that realization, and she wasn’t even sure when it had first started to dawn on her. Had it been while she talked and laughed with Glimmer on the other side of a force field? While she sat in the rubble of the Fright Zone after Double Trouble’s final betrayal? While she stood in Scorpia’s bedroom, letting a note fall silently to the floor? Or had it only happened then, in that foreboding hallway of Prime’s ship, when Adora slid in the last piece of the puzzle? In any case, she supposed the when of it didn’t matter. She knew now.

As she reached that thought, Catra felt a rustling down by her feet, and then the bed frame rocked slightly as Adora stood back up. Catra was conscious of Adora’s eyes on her face for a brief moment, before she heard a soft sigh. What the sigh meant Catra couldn’t say, but before she had time to contemplate it Adora’s footsteps began moving away. Soon she heard the sound of the door opening and closing, and then her room was silent once again.

As soon as she was gone, Catra opened her eyes and sat up, staring at the featureless surface of the door. Even after all that thought, she _still_ had no idea what she was going to say to Adora. She again considered getting up to take a quick walk, at least to find some different scenery, but decided against it. Now that she knew what this place was, she knew every inch would be just as painful. In any case, she still felt exhausted, and as much as she dreaded it she knew she needed to get more sleep. So rather than getting up to follow after Adora, Catra flopped back down onto her back, resuming the exercise she had started the evening with: staring at the ceiling.

Adora’s scent was already dissipating in the crisp air of the ship, but Catra wasn’t bothered by that. She knew Adora would be back. After what she’d done on Prime’s ship, Catra knew now that Adora would always come back. Even if Adora hated her, and still saw her as nothing but an enemy, she would still come back to be the hero. She’d told Catra that she mattered to her, that she wouldn’t abandon her again, and Catra believed her.

That was why Catra needed to get away.

As long as she was around Adora, she couldn’t trust herself. Too much had happened, too much had been said. So much had passed between them that Catra couldn’t imagine how Adora would ever forgive her. But most importantly, Catra was still what she had always been: _spiteful_.

She could feel it still, beneath all the guilt and regret over the choices she had made since. She still felt resentment towards Adora. And it was made all the worse because now, even after everything she’d done, she knew that in some small way the resentment was justified.

Adora had been condescending and thoughtless. Adora had been myopic. Adora had left. And even now, Catra was desperate for that to be acknowledged.

But now it was too late. She had ruined her own chances at reconciliation and healing. How could she ask Adora to apologize to her now, after what she done to her and her friends? Why would anyone on Etheria want to hear that, yes, Catra had been hurt too? She had had so many chances before. She could have talked to Adora. She could have _chosen_ to be vulnerable in front of her for once, to weaken herself in a way that wasn’t forced on her. But she didn’t, because she was too scared of losing what she had.

Because Adora had also been comforting. Adora had made her laugh. Adora had come back every time but one. Despite all her grievances, what she had had with Adora was priceless.

And now it was gone.

“Win the battle, lose the war”, she muttered into the darkness. Thinking back to that dusty bar in the Crimson Waste, she almost had to laugh. For that moment at least, her eyes had been open.

Catra blinked back tears as the realization truly settled in. Whatever happened, her relationship with Adora was over, and she would have to live with that fact for the rest of her life. But for now, she knew what she had to do. Adora would never admit that things were unsalvageable. She had never been the type to give up, and she would push herself past the breaking point again and again. She would do this, all for someone who was always going to end up hurting her again. And one last time, the image came to Catra’s mind.

“ _I’m always going to be your friend_ ,” said by a smiling and welcoming face. A smiling and welcoming face that had just been sliced open for daring to ask that same friend a question.

And there it was: the crux of Catra’s problem distilled down into one damning scene, to be repeated again and again. Whatever else she could do, Catra was not about to let that continue.

Somewhere under the sadness, Catra felt a familiar surge of determination. This, at least, was a plan. Not a very well thought-out plan, but Catra had always thrived on improvisation. All she had to do was get Sparkles and Arrow Boy to stop the ship next time it passed near a planet. They at least should be easier to convince than Adora.

But first, Catra needed to get some amount of sleep. So, reluctantly, she rolled over and closed her eyes once again, praying that the nightmares would keep away for just one night. Though as the image of the dark, alien geometry of the room slipped away, the pervasive sense of unease remained. And once again Catra heard what every room she’d ever tried to sleep in seemed to be telling her.

Get out.

For the first time, Catra resolved to listen.

**Author's Note:**

> Again, everyone's still in a pretty bad place right now. But as we know from the show, things will get better. I also know that I'm addressing some pretty heavy topics here, so if anyone feels like I'm handling things inappropriately, please let me know.
> 
> I am extremely grateful to [Doublepasse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doublepasse) for beta reading this chapter and generally giving me advice as I get back into the fanfic game. You absolutely have to give her story, [For my Sake](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16728153/chapters/39236862), a read. Also, I have to give credit to [Johannas_Motivational_Insults](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johannas_Motivational_Insults) and [AkariHope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AkariHope) for being major inspirations. If you haven't read [Demons](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18026990/chapters/42594701) by the former or [A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20224906/chapters/47930662) by the latter, you really, really need to. And if you have, you're probably not surprised that they influenced this story.
> 
> Also, it took all of my willpower not to call this chapter "In Space, No One Can Hear You Angst", but I'm a Very Serious Person, so here we are.


End file.
